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Friday, January 18, 2013

Broken City

Review by Matt Finley

I won’t bury the lede: the only thing
less inspired than BROKEN CITY’s dime-store paperback title
is its used-up flophouse mattress of a plot. Directed by Alan Hughes
(THE BOOK OF ELI) from the first produced screenplay by writer
Brian Tucker, the film is bland, overlong, and borderline
nonsensical, offering the most facile of underdog fantasies: a single
working-class schlub who, with the aid of a little elbow grease and
whole lotta moral outrage, single-handedly challenges the
cartoonishly corrupt mayor of New York City.

If only it were lousy enough to be
remarkable – a concerted train wreck or an unintended cult classic.
Alas, lazy dialogue, mediocre performances, hum-drum action
sequences, and a conspiracy plot that substitutes convolution for
intelligence ensure that it’s the most mediocre form of crap.

Mark Wahlberg (TED) plays Billy
Taggart, a disgraced cop turned hang-dog P.I. who’s pulled into a
web of political corruption after being hired by Mayor
Hostetler (LES MISÉRABLES’ Russell Crowe) to sniff out the
man he believes is sleeping with his activist wife, Cathleen (ROCK
OF AGES’ Catherine Zeta-Jones). Of course it’s an election
year, and the intrigue extends far beyond simple marital infidelity.

If it wasn’t bad enough that the
linchpin of the corruption storyline feels straight out of a ‘90s
SNL film – the mayor selling off the city’s largest housing
project to a private development firm – CITY’s portrayal
of the mayoral race reduces both economics and politics to cave
painting simplicity. We know from the outset that the charismatic
Hostetler is a mean ol’ Scrooge McDuck selling the city down river
while trumpeting the common good, just as we know that his
adversary, the soft-spoken, weird-looking Jack Vallient (FLAGS OF
OUR FATHERS' Barry Pepper is an honest do-gooder (Get it? 'cuz
his name is #$%^ing Vallient) who’s looking out for the city and
its people.

At a time when LINCOLN
brilliantly (and humorously) demonstrated how the ethical flexibility
of our ideological leaders has, at times, been the savior of our
country’s moral core, this heroes and villains bunk simply doesn’t
fly.

Even Taggart’s story arc – a
spiraling descent into the greasy underbelly of the city's
bureaucracy – is laden with obvious imagery, including one scene in
which he literally takes a bath. I wonder if we’re meant to think
he’s washing off the stink of corruption? (Hint: we are.)

To be clear, it isn’t the promise of
possible social change I resent - the theme of marginalized cog
refusing to spin its expected course, thereby undermining the larger,
insidious machinations of tarnished clockwork, is a classic trope of
proletariat literature (and watch-themed erotica). I abhor the
oversimplification of the enemy, and the assertion that the
oppression of the lower class can be attributed to mustache-twirling,
flesh-and-blue-blood villains rather than a complex,
self-perpetuating system of socio-cultural failures at all economic
levels.

But Americans love to turn their
elected officials into scapegoats. Certainly politics is filled with
empty rhetoric, broken promises and, in the extreme, corruption, but
all BROKEN CITY shows us is that it’s much easier to end the
conversation there than to explore the systemic mechanisms that allow
these iniquities to sustain and repeat across history.

Even working from such an immaturely
jaded perspective, the film would be much more effective were it to
force the audience to identify with the thousands of
manipulated voters, who the film suggests are keeping the mayor in
office, rather than with the one heroic outlier who challenges him.
Bottom line: it’s easy to make a theater full of Americans shake
their heads in disgust at rotten political caricatures when we aren’t
forced to confront the fact that we’re the ones who elect them.

Blah blah blah. Look, I really have
nothing positive to say about this film, and I don’t want to wax
faux socio-political anymore when really I’m just a grumpy nerd
who, full disclosure, doesn’t care for Wahlberg or Crowe even when
they’re in good movies. There’s a reason BROKEN CITY got
dumped in the middle of January. Don’t see it. (1 out 4 stars)